Insights and Updates

In almost every group, there is a unanimous view that other groups are inferior to one's own. — The historian Will Durant Deep-seated arrogance and self-righteousness are an inborn affliction of humankind. Everyone may have his beliefs, whatever they are. A person believes what he…

This is some of what I tell my students in class; I now set it down as an essay for everyone's correction. First, the doctor treats the patient, not the disease. So the first checkpoint in treating illness is treating the person (bian ren lun…

This is one of my own failed TCM cases. The late Shanghai master Cheng Menxue once resolved to publish his own failed cases for the instruction of later learners, but unfortunately, for various reasons, the book was never completed. Every physician treating disease has both…

Mr. Fan, born September 1992, male. On February 23, 2017, when I was invited to Hangzhou to see patients, Mr. Fan came from Shanghai to Hangzhou to meet me for the first time, referred by one of my patients. The patient is a native of…

Ms. Wang, female, born 1967, a native of Gansu, long resident in Lanzhou, employed at a Lanzhou university. On December 25, 2016, she came to Beijing together with her fellow patient Ms. Chen for a first consultation with me. The patient has a family history…

Ms. Chen, first consultation in Beijing on December 25, 2016 Ms. Chen, female, born May 14, 1969, a native of Gansu, long resident in Jiuquan, recently convalescing mainly in Lanzhou. She once studied medicine but did not practice it. She worked in a clerical post…

My birthday falls on the 18th day of the seventh lunar month. As a child, whenever the Ghost Festival arrived, I knew my birthday was near. I was born in the countryside, in a poor family. As a child I ate poorly; most of the…

Years ago, an old TCM physician took on apprentices; I went, drawn by his reputation, hoping to become his student and study medicine with him. The first time I met him, he took out a criminal judgment and showed it to me, telling me that…

As a practitioner of TCM, I know its therapeutic effects very deeply. TCM can treat many diseases, including terminal illnesses like cancer, where it has some effect. But to boast of TCM's efficacy as omnipotent is either ignorance or lack of conscience. People often tell…

Great Beijing is so vast that most people who come to this city can never rise to prominence; in the end they all live unobtrusively. Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking opens by creating the figure of Yao Sian, a Daoist man living in Beijing who…